Group of N.L. women sue after breasts removed over faulty cancer tests

A group of women in Newfoundland and Labrador who were erroneously told they had breast cancer — then had both their breasts removed — are fighting to get the evidence they say they need to show negligent doctors — and a broken system — are to blame for their ordeal.

The women say they want the local health authority to send tissue samples from their breasts to an impartial pathologist for testing to find out where the system fell apart and who is to blame.

The lawyer representing three of the women in a lawsuit filed Wednesday said the test will show whether doctors overstated the severity of cancerous tumours — based on poorly conducted testing at a local laboratory — before recommending the women have their breasts removed to stop the cancer from spreading.

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“Until we have that (expert) opinion, we don’t know if we have a case,” St. John’s medical malpractice lawyer Ches Crosbie told Postmedia News on Wednesday.

According to tests done as part of a provincial inquiry, none of the nine women who had double mastectomies needed their invasive surgery.

Crosbie said Eastern Health, Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial health authority, is refusing to send the tissue samples to Nova Scotia by courier, a practice he says is common across the country when an outside expert’s opinion is needed.

Along with having both her breasts removed unnecessarily in 1999, one of the women, Myrtle Lewis, 63, of Roddickton, N.L., had six cycles of chemotherapy and various X-rays, which she also didn’t need, according to court documents.

The documents say Lewis “suffered, both mentally and physically from surgery and chemotherapy treatments, as well as from the stress and anxiety of believing, for approximately seven years, that she had invasive cancer, and the indignity of having both breasts removed.”

The allegations in the women’s statement of claim have not been tested in court.

A spokesperson from Eastern Health did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday, so it was not clear whether a statement of defence is in the works.

In the fall of 2005, an unrelated investigation found that there were serious problems with the estrogen and progesterone receptorstesting — used by doctors to help decide what type of treatment a patient needs — at Eastern Health Laboratories in St. John’s, the facility responsible for Lewis’s test.

As a result, all tests done between May 1997 and August 2005, including Lewis’s tissue sample, were sent to Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto for re-testing.

An investigation headed by Judge Margaret Cameron cited faulty breast-cancer tests, lab mistakes and lack of oversight as being among the reasons nearly 400 patients received the wrong results on their tests.

In her 2009 report, dubbed the Cameron Commission, the judge also found the errors might have been detected years before — possibly as early as 1999 — had quality assurance and quality control policies been in place and followed at Eastern Health.

“The procedures and protocols within Eastern Health for ER/PR testing during the period from 1997 to 2005 were so deficient as to be practically non-existent,” Cameron stated. “They were neither reasonable nor appropriate.”

In Lewis’s case, a doctor at Mt. Sinai found she had a type of cancer — ductal carcinoma in situ — which required neither complete removal of the breast, nor chemotherapy.

Unfortunately for Lewis, she learned the news a full seven years after her breasts had been removed.

Crosbie said that, in order to find out if the doctors responsible for Lewis’s care were negligent and legally at fault, the tissue sample needs to be re-tested by an impartial expert — someone outside of St. John’s, so the results will be above suspicion.

Eastern Health has said it will allow the tissue to be re-tested, but that the doctor must travel to St. John’s to do the test.

Crosbie called that a “barrier to access to justice” because he said it will cost “10 to 20 times more for a doctor to travel there than it would for them to send the sample by courier.”

He said that although the women he’s representing all had unnecessary surgery, there surely are women out there who needed care and didn’t get it because their botched tests showed nothing was wrong.

Lewis is suing Eastern Health and her primary doctor for loss of income, general damages, trial costs, and “further relief.”

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